My Daughter Was Beaten, Locked Away, and Threatened by Her Millionaire Husband’s Family—When They Laughed at Me and Said My Military Rank Didn’t Frighten Them, I Slowly Turned Around and Made One Move They Never Expected. / Chapter 49 / 100

Chapter 49 - Fall of Tartarus

Abigail didn't hesitate. She turned back to the central console, slamming her cryptographic drive into the primary diagnostic port.

The master screen of the Hephaestus platform flickered, reflecting off her determined face. The thirty-six scarlet trajectories were entering the stratosphere now. The friction of reentry had turned the tungsten rods into flaming spears of hyper-velocity destruction, their outer surfaces glowing at three thousand degrees Celsius.

*TERMINAL TRAJECTORY: UNALTERABLE. IMPACT MINUS 04:30.*

"I can't alter the de-orbit velocity!" Abigail screamed above the deafening shriek of collapsing bulkheads. The entire chamber was tilting. The molten magma below was bubbling violently as thousands of tons of freezing ocean water poured into the pit, creating massive steam explosions that shook the foundation of the world. "The physical trajectory is locked by gravity! They’re already falling!"

I hauled myself up, using the severed railing for support, every rib in my chest screaming in agony. I stumbled to her side, leaning over the console, my bloody hand leaving a crimson smear across the glass.

"Abigail," I said, my voice cutting through her panic like a beacon through the fog. "Don't stop the fall. Redirect their control fins. Shift their atmospheric glide paths!"

"Where?!" she asked, her hands blurring across the keys as lines of override code fought through the Archon Directorate's root defenses. "If I divert them away from the capitals, they’ll strike the oceans! The kinetic impact will trigger megatsunamis that will wipe out every coastline on the planet!"

"Look at the telemetry map!" Vance shouted, pointing at the vast, uninhabited ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctic poles. "The abyssal trenches! The empty wastes!"

"No," Abigail said, her eyes suddenly widening as an audacious, brilliant realization struck her. "The platform's orbital telemetry is networked through the Directorate's private satellite constellation. If I force the kinetic rods into an inverted aerodynamic stall, they won't hit the surface at Mach 10."

"They’ll skip," I breathed, understanding her plan instantly. "Like stones across a pond."

"They’ll skip off the dense layers of the upper atmosphere," she said, hammering the final override sequences into the terminal. "Their kinetic energy will bleed off in the exosphere, and they’ll burn up harmlessly before they ever touch the earth!"

*WARNING: SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED. DIRECT ERROR: CODE OUROBOROS BLACK.*

On the screen, a prompt appeared, demanding a physical biometric confirmation. A palm print.

"It requires Julian’s biometrics!" Vance yelled.

I didn't waste a second. I drew my combat blade, marched back to where Julian Sterling lay pinned beneath his shattered exoskeleton, grabbed the old man by his hair, and hauled his right hand up to the scanning glass.

"No... you fools... you'll destroy everything we built!" Julian shrieked, his voice cracking with senile despair.

I slammed his bloody palm down onto the optical sensor.

*BIOMETRICS CONFIRMED. HEPHAESTUS GLIDE PATH REALIGNED. RE-ENTRY ANGLE MODIFIED TO PLUS FIFTEEN DEGREES.*

On the panoramic holographic display, the thirty-six red lines suddenly shifted. As the tungsten rods struck the thick ozone layer of the stratosphere, they did not plunge downward toward the cities of man. They skipped.

Across the night skies of North America, Europe, and Asia, millions of people looked up to see a breathtaking, terrifying spectacle: thirty-six blazing meteors streaking across the firmament, trailing incandescent tails of ionized plasma, before slowly, harmlessly disintegrating into dust high above the curvature of the Earth.

The world was saved.

But beneath the floor of the Pacific Ocean, the reckoning had arrived.

A catastrophic wall of black water smashed through the upper observation decks of the cavern. Station Tartarus was torn from its volcanic anchors, collapsing inward under the impossible weight of eleven hundred atmospheres.